Darkness dispensed
After spending nearly 20 years living with the character of Bradford detective Harry Virdee, former pharmacist AA Dhand is set to see his literary creation hit the small screen. Yvette Huddleston reports.
BACK in 2016 an exciting new voice in the crime thriller genre burst onto the scene with the publication of AA Dhand’s novel Streets of Darkness. Set in Bradford, where the author was born and raised, and with a British-Asian detective as its central character, it brought a fresh perspective and deservedly received a lot of attention and acclaim.
The TV rights were snapped up pretty quickly and comparisons were made at the time with the popular BBC drama Luther and HBO’s phenomenally successful series The Wire.
The book’s protagonist, DI Hardeep “Harry” Virdee, was a detective who knew the streets of his home city like the back of his hand, a hard-working police officer respected by his colleagues with a complicated home life in that he had been disowned by his Sikh family for marrying Saima, a practising Muslim.
It is an estrangement that causes him much pain and which he spends a lot of time trying to find ways of resolving.
That first novel made a big impression. Dhand followed it up with two more, Girl Zero and City of Sinners, which were equally successful – and now Harry Virdee will soon be heading to our TV screens.
It was announced earlier this autumn that the BBC had commissioned Virdee, a new sixpart drama based on Dhand’s novels. It will begin filming in and around Bradford later this year with Sacha Dhawan, who played the Master in Doctor Who and starred in psychological thriller Wolf, in the leading role of Harry Virdee.
The series will introduce viewers to Virdee as he tries to track down a killer who is targeting Bradford’s Asian community, while navigating his ongoing domestic difficulties.
Virdee’s journey from page to screen has been, as is often the case, a long and circuitous one.
“When we sold the TV rights for the first novel seven years ago, I was on board to adapt it,” says Dhand. “I hadn’t ever done screenwriting before and it was a great opportunity.
“I spent a couple of years writing it but it didn’t make it. Then we handed it on to another screenwriter who spent a couple of years working on it and that didn’t work out either so after that the rights came back to me.”
During that period, Dhand decided to hone his screenwriting skills. “Having spent ten years writing novels by that time, I started reading and studying scripts. I put a lot of work in – I read around 200 scripts and I really enjoyed seeing how different screenwriters approached it.
“It made me think that actually maybe I was always a screenwriter who had become a novelist. I feel as though the books were written, in a way, for television.”
That makes perfect sense. The dialogue in his novels is all so real, believable and naturalistic – it is a key element in what makes his storytelling so compelling while the propulsive narrative drive of his books and the episodic nature of the story arc is also reminiscent of long-form television.
When the adaptation of Streets of Darkness wasn’t picked up for the second time, Dhand decided to work on something completely different, a standalone original series.
On completion, he sold it successfully to a production company which gave him the boost he needed to return to the Harry Virdee script.
“I came back to it with renewed confidence,” he says. “I wrote the script with help and support from the production company. We did it and this time it worked.”
Harry Virdee has been with Dhand for a long time, nearly 20 years – but he started out as quite a different kind of character.
“In 2006 when I first wrote him, he was a workaholic womanising cop, and it just wasn’t working – I had read all those crime thrillers with characters like that in them. It was only later that I realised the reason he wasn’t working as a character was because I hadn’t written him authentically.
“That was a revelation and it was very freeing for me. I knew I wanted to write an authentic British Asian character and I wrote the first draft of Streets of Darkness in about four weeks – I just wrote everything I knew.”
When we speak, Dhand is hard at work completing the scripts for the BBC series – he is writing all six episodes – and he has another Virdee novel in the pipeline, due for publication next year, as well as a new series of books planned.
Up until March this year, he was also still working full-time as a pharmacist during the day and writing at night. It was the success of his writing career that eventually led to him having to make a tough choice.
“It was just getting too hard to do it all,” he says. “So, I sold the business and I am now a full-time writer. It was a very difficult decision to give up working as a pharmacist because it was something I really loved doing.”
He says he has found that the life of a fulltime writer can be quite isolating and there have been adjustments to make.
“I miss being behind a counter interacting with people. I love talking and listening to people. I love the community and the city and the people I met. I grew up on a working-class estate in Bradford where my parents ran a corner shop and I spent most of my time in there observing people. You would hear 300 conversations every day.”
To support the production of Virdee, the Screen Academy Bradford has been established, supported by the BBC and others, to deliver a series of bespoke training programmes across all departments designed to address specific crew shortages and skills gaps, particularly among underserved groups in Bradford.
“It was important when we were deciding on making the series that we didn’t just get lots of people from outside coming into the city, working on the series and then leaving again,” says Dhand.
“I am a passionate Bradfordian and it is important to me that we leave a legacy. So we thought about how we could create something for young people in Bradford from the south Asian and white working-class communities that are in entry level jobs who can help us make the show.
“We are a young city – it’s well known that Bradford has the youngest population in the UK – how can we encourage those young people to get into industries that they might not necessarily think of? It is about trying to get people into the room and break down those barriers. I want to champion my city in every way, whether behind the scenes or on camera.”
Dhand feels that things are now coming together for him in an exciting way. “The books took ten years to write and it has taken seven years to get the stories to the screen so it is hugely satisfying,” he says. “And I feel a great sense of pride that we will have this amazing show in Bradford. I hope to do the city and the character of Harry Virdee justice.”